Expressions

It's amazing how we communicate without words. Myriads of languages and zillions of dialects. But somehow we manage to express ourselves. With gestures. With our faces. With our eyes. With that elusive smile. And that disapproving frown.

Some of us are more expressive than the others. There are some people like me, who are absolutely incapable from hiding an emotion by keeping it off our faces. There are others who have visages of stone--people whose minds you can never read just because they never so much as betray a single emotion. And there are yet others who switch between these states of extreme expressiveness and extreme phelgmatism.

If you go about observing the expressions of people you can learn a lot. The world is your classroom. This is one area where you can never stop experimenting and also one where it's so difficult to propound a definite theory. Every man on the street and every child in the park is your subject. See if you can fathom their expressions. If you are so sensitive as to gauge the ongoings of people's minds, you're a true wizard.

There are billions of people. And trillions of expressions flash across their faces every minute. How do you make sense of it all? Just go about guessing what each person is thinking? How can you be sure that two different people use the same expression for the same emotion? Maybe they mean to convey entirely different messages. Reading expressions then, is an unempirical science. Or maybe it's not science in the first place. Maybe it's an art. And a difficult one to master at that.